Business Centre
by Jessa L'Rynn
Summary: Any place with this many sublevels is bound to have it's own division of hell...
1. Synergy

_**The Centre is Bad Enough Without Synergy**_

_Spring 1996 (1997?) shortly following the precipitous departure of the Pretender_

The envelope was sitting on Sydney's desk one sunny Monday morning. The good doctor stared at it as though it was a letter bomb, which expression, given where he worked and some of his co-workers, was somewhat more resigned than others might consider a similar missive. As his name was placed in the middle of the envelope with a laser-printed sticker in Arial bold, with his very rare employee number included, he knew who had probably sent the envelope.

"What's up, Spock?" Miss Parker, despite having been publicly educated, often gave the appearance of having fewer social skills than her sequestered counterparts. She never answered the phone politely, and was now demonstrating that she'd long forgotten how to knock. She strode into Sydney's office without even announcing her presence, the technician, Broots, in tow as if he had no other purpose in life.

"Did you get a notice from HR as well?" Sydney asked, still considering poking the envelope with a pencil to make sure it was completely dead.

"N-no," Broots stammered. He, too, looked at the envelope as if it might hold an attendant demon, and even Parker gave it wide berth as she stepped around Sydney's desk to mind his other business for him.

"Did you open it?" Broots asked. "What does it say?"

"I've been afraid to find out," Sydney admitted.

Parker rolled her eyes. "Open the damned envelope, Freud," she snapped. "We've got work to do."

There were three employees at the Centre that nearly every other employee avoided like a job. Miss Parker was one of them, the Chairman's beautiful, vicious daughter, with a reputation that was at least three times colder than her actual personality, and possibly more dangerous as well. Mr. Raines was another, and that needed no further clarification than the name.

The third, however, was obviously the person who'd sent the missive Sydney now pulled from the envelope. The paper was a dead give away - it was an iridescent, unholy, and thoroughly disreputable shade of yellow. Across the top of the offensive paper was the more offensive statement, scrawled in bright, perky, and cruelly pink letters.

Sydney's eyes flicked over the paper and then he knew for certain. The document had indeed been sent by the Centre's Director of Personnel, Suzie "Bubbles" Miruble ("It's easy to spell if you just remember that '_I'_ am here for _'u'_!"). Of all the sweepers, cleaners, doctors, lawyers, and lay-terrorists the Centre employed, only Bubbles Miruble _always_ got what she wanted. Helpless, Sydney stared until someone shoved the paper, snapping its baleful, hypnotic influence.

"Well?" Parker purred, glaring into his eyes over the top of the yellow tragedy.

Sydney sighed. "It seems the Centre has decided to punish me for my role in Jarod's escape," he admitted. It was the only possible explanation, after all.

Parker's voice oozed false sympathy. "Aw, did they take away your Xeroxing privileges on all your test subjects?"

"No," Sydney said grimly. He handed her the missive, somewhat mollified as she flinched away from the pinkness and the sweetness and the butterfly-sunshine-puppy-happiness. "I've been made co-Coordinator for the United Way campaign."

"That's cold," said Broots, shocked and wild-eyed. "That's... that's really cold."

"Good god, Sydney," Parker began, somewhat apologetically.

She never got to finish. The door to the Sim Lab flung open and a tiny ginger whirlwind clattered inside. "Hi, Sydney, did you get the wonderful news, I've always wanted to work more directly with you, isn't it exciting, I just wanted to check you got the memo, we don't want to be late for the coordinators meeting, it's in Dover, we should probably leave now, I hope you don't mind driving..."

The steady stream of hyperactive, breathless, perky patter continued while Sydney collected his hat, briefcase, and a notepad, and Bubbles availed herself of his arm. His teammates just stared at Sydney as if he was a pariah suddenly (he technically was) and said absolutely nothing in his defense. Even Parker stepped aside to allow Sydney to be dragged away with the fragile tatters of his dignity.

"...and your accent, your voice, I think that's just what we've needed, so we've decided to set the goal rather high this year..." Sydney looked at Parker to beg her for her intervention. The woman wouldn't even meet his eyes. Whatever plague Bubbles carried with her had already gotten on him, and he was doomed. In mere seconds the door of his haven closed behind him, and all the tortures of the damned to meetings opened before him.

* * *

"If Jarod calls," Parker growled, "make sure he knows about this."

Broots gaped at her. "Wha... Bubbles Miruble... why... which... wha?"

"He needs to know what he's done," Parker snarled. "If this is the kind of torture Sydney has to endure for his sake!"

"D-do do you think it'll get him t-to come back?" Broots asked.

Parker slumped against Sydney's desk. "No," she admitted. "But he might have some sympathy for the poor bastard." She smirked. "Or at least some spare change."


	2. Purchasing

_**As Always, the Purchasing Director is a Sadist**_

_Sometime in the middle of Season 2_

A tiny sound, like a fruit fly clearing its throat, broke the waiting silence of Miss Parker's office. She finally decided to have some mercy, and looked up from the desk to see what Broots had for her. She's only kept him waiting three minutes, this time. It had to be a... "Who the hell are you?" she asked, of the painfully skinny, freckled blond standing next to her desk. She could snap him in half with one hand.

"I'm Ted," Match-stick boy introduced himself in something very close to a plaintive whisper. "Jim Brown sent me."

This didn't clear one single thing up for Parker. She'd been in Corporate for a long time, long enough that she wouldn't know Jim Brown from Charlie Brown (although she suspected there might not be much difference). However, Ted was too tall, too thin, too pasty. His clothes came from garage sales and exchanges with friends, and were exactly the wrong color to suit him. Miss Parker was almost certain that if she shot him and searched his body, she'd find an over the counter inhaler, more pens and pencils than a human being could use in a lifetime, at least one pocket calculator, and a membership card for either the Star Trek or Lord of the Rings fan clubs.

In short, Ted was a geek. This meant that he was most likely to hang out and work with other geeks, which in turn suggested that his boss, the not-so-famous Jim Brown, was also a geek. That could only mean one thing - the Technical Support Department. Following from there, she narrowed down in her mind the people who Jim Brown couldn't be, and finally realized that he had to be Broots' rare and nomadic boss, the Director of Information Systems.

"Where the hell is Broots?" Parker growled. It had only taken her a moment to reach the conclusions she'd reached, after all, and the primary one she'd reached that she didn't like was that Jim Brown had re-appropriated her peon and was trying to stick her with a sub-standard peon instead.

"He's in the Tech Room, working on the upgrade." If Broots stammered, she wasn't sure what to call what this kid did - flailed, possibly. It wasn't a natural stutter, either, more that he was whispering half of words and choking the other half, possibly hoping that she'd stop asking him questions, or that he'd disappear.

"What upgrade?" she demanded. "And why is my technician working on an upgrade instead of special projects, which is what his job description says?"

Ted looked at her very much as if he wished she'd just get on with the business of shooting the messenger, without questioning him first. "Everybody's been pulled to work on the upgrade," he said. "I'm supposed to show you how to find your files and then go back..."

"Oh, for the love of... Where is your boss?"

"In the Tower," Ted whimpered. "They called him up to work on Mr. Raines' machine. You see, the upgrade... isn't going well."

Parker felt like a cigarette, so she lit one and then, with sudden sympathy for the kid who'd been sent to tell her the place had been sent to computer hell today, offered him one as well. He looked at her like she was crazy for a split second, then practically jumped on the offered smoke and lit it like his hope of heaven. Parker almost smiled with complete understanding when the kid took a long draw. "What's happening?" she asked, convinced that sympathy would get her more information than intimidation this time.

"So far?" Ted asked slowly. Parker nodded. The kid took a quick drag and then, in a breathless, panicked voice, began a long, frantic tirade. "We turned the software on, and it immediately tried to send confirmation copies of all orders to major news networks. We managed to head that off by unplugging the server from the mainframe, but then it started emailing the foreign nation confirmations to the nearest rival country. Mister Broots stopped that, as well as the carbon copies to the State Department, but no one could do anything about the list of the executive credit cards, complete with numbers, being transferred to some guy called Vinnie in the Bronx. Every time we think we've got all the bugs and holes plugged, and try to patch it back to the mainframe, it does something else, I've never seen..."

Parker absently patted Ted's hand. This sounded exactly like something... "Please tell me we didn't accidentally buy software from Jarod," she ordered quietly.

Ted finished his cigarette, then gave her a look like he was about to tell her her pet bunny had died. He'd better not. "It wasn't an accident," he said at last.

She stared at Ted. "Did you say..." she began in a deathly quiet whisper.

Slouching in on himself as if to protect his exposed belly, Ted repeated in a miserable grumble, "It wasn't an accident. The Purchasing Director said he put in the lowest bid."

Parker practically vaulted to her feet. "Get back to work," she ordered tersely, already half-way across the room before she'd even finished the sentence.

"Miss Parker, what're you..."

"I'm going upstairs," she said. "It seems someone needs to change the air in the Purchasing Director's head, again."


End file.
